Letter in response to Hermann Meiners’s series on holistic dentistry

Letter to the editor

To ZM, zm@kzbv.de

Dear Sir or Madam,

I hereby request publication of the following letter in full.

Bravo, ZM. As the journal representing all dentists, you have once again made yourselves, or allowed yourselves to be made, a one-sided mouthpiece for the faith community of science.

The purported “high level of knowledge transfer” is, for the most part, nothing other than Meiners's private opinion and a miscellany of platitudes and lamentation.

With this article, he has issued himself a certificate of scientific inadequacy.

Moreover, with this series he and ZM have dismissed some 12,000–15,000 doctors and dentists who practise experiential medicine or naturopathy using such methods in Germany alone as dangerous irrationalists and fools.

Skilfully—one must grant him that—Meiners has turned the argument around, mixed in half-truths and cleverly combined a few core statements of the “alternatives” with emotional remarks of his own, creating the impression that he—and thus university science (on enquiry, no organisation is responsible for defining the term science)—alone is right.

What hubris.

Where is the scientific rigour Meiners demands in his own article?

Had an “alternative” practitioner written such an article, its emotional reasoning would immediately have consigned it to the category of unobjective writing.

As a physicist, Meiners too should engage with the latest scientific findings, for example in scalar-wave physics (if he has done so, he appears not to have understood them), before passing such devastating judgments as a categorical rejection of alternative diagnostic methods or the assertion that resonance tests display a supreme disregard for the laws of physics.

If that were so, how could it be possible for a physioenergetic (kinesiological) resonance test (diagnosis) of jaw osteitis (Lechner 1996) to be histologically verified in 99.6% (!) of cases, if both were as wrong as he claims? A so-called scientific investigation can only dream of such a result.

For a scientist conducting research without prejudice, categorical judgments should already be out of the question, unless his own worldview obscures his vision; otherwise he is already admitting that his horizon is too narrow and behaving pseudo-scientifically or unscientifically—the very thing Meiners accuses the “alternatives” of doing.

Furthermore, he portrays as stupid some 80% of the population who seek examination and treatment by alternative methods, not because scientific medicine (which also rests on experience) has everything under control, but because it fails on crucial issues such as chronic diseases, hospitalism, medication side effects and, above all, humanity.

To infer from the term complementary that alternative methods thereby acknowledge their failure “where scientific medicine achieves successes” is so absurd that the assertion can simply be left to stand.

Contrary to Meiners's claim, the paradigm shift has already taken place—except in medicine; he simply appears not yet to have noticed it in his faith in medical science.

Yours faithfully,